Thread: think

did dinosours live on earth at the same time as people?

no

dinosaurs : 220 - 65 million years ago
man + his direct ancestors : 7 million years ago - now

i'm surprised that anyone can still consider this to be a proper scientific question

Yes I did.
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee?
(kidding)

depends on if you count crocodiles, frogs, etc.

frogs = amphibians, evolved in the triassic (more or less at the same time as dinosaurs), probably from temnospondyls
crocodiles = non-dinosaurian archosaurs (archosaurs split into 2 main branches in the triassic, one leading to crocodyles, the other to dinosaurs, pterosaurs and birds)

so it doesn't really matter whether frogs and crocodyles co-exist with man, they're not dinosaurs

however, birds could be called dinosaurs since they evolved from dromaeosaurian dinosaurs, so in a way dinosaurs are still with us - but that's not usually what people think of when they talk about dinosaurs being contemporaneous with man : they think non-avian dinosaurs and alley-oop or the flintstones

Well, since a lack of fossils isn't actually proof of their total extinction...... we must concede the possibility. It is possible mankind existed earlier than there are fossils to prove, and it is possible that a few dinosaurs here and there existed long after there are fossils to prove.


However, we have no evidence of mankind ever co-existing with dinosaurs except a few cave paintings here and there that depict beasts that look quite a lot like them interacting with humans. But, it could be that they were painting mythical creatures they had imagined. I don't know enough about cave drawings to know if they did that.

i know that absence of proof is not proof of absence, but if we look back to the mammals that were around at the K-T boundary of 65 million years ago, most of them did not exceed shrew or squirrel size, and none of them look remotely like a human being - on the other hand, there is a fairly good record showing the stepping stones from Aegyptopithecus around 35 million years ago to Proconsul around 20 million years ago and Australopithecus around 4 million years ago

since we can only go by the evidence that we have and not by the evidence that we wished we had, i'd say the fossil record makes it highly unlikely that anything approaching a human being existed 15 million years ago, let alone 65 million years ago

as for non-avian dinosaurs living into the Tertiary, i'm afraid the burden of proof is on those claiming that they have survived - i haven't seen a single bit of evidence supporting such a claim that stands up to closer scrutiny

Originally Posted by kojax

However, we have no evidence of mankind ever co-existing with dinosaurs except a few cave paintings here and there that depict beasts that look quite a lot like them interacting with humans.

extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs - show me photographs of these paintings + who interpreted them as dinosaurs
most of the cave paintings i'm aware of (+i've seen several in person in france and spain) depict bison, horses, aurochs, mammoths, deer and some carnivores
there are also some "therianthropes" which are either interpreted as shamans, people disguised as animals or dream creatures - some of them look like people with the head of a deer or something like it, but none that i know of look anywhere near like a dinosaur